


Bounty, Unbound

by ahimsabitches



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Light Angst, Medium smut, Other people's OC, generous sprinkling of sass, god i am such shit at tagging i'm sorry, lil bit of blood, lil bit of fluff, space sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-22 04:32:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13159347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahimsabitches/pseuds/ahimsabitches
Summary: This is my secret santa gift for @rileyomalley on Tumblr!





	Bounty, Unbound

To his credit, the only hint Udonta gave that the needle piercing his hide bothered him was an occasional curl of his lip, not even enough to expose his snaggled teeth.

Riley figured he was used to pain.

She adjusted her seat on the rickety stool next to the bare infirmary bunk on which he sat, head tilted to the left and the right sleeve of his red Ravager coat off his shoulder. He’d undone only enough of the clothes underneath to bare a hand-sized section of his blue skin, but it was enough for Riley to see wounds older than the one she was currently stitching up. Scars now, arrowing across his flesh like pale blue comets. If scars clustered this thickly on such a small part of him, what must the rest of him look like?

_Why the fuck am I thinking of Udonta naked?_

Riley shook the thought out of her head, and her two-toned hair, jostled from its braid by the chaos of battle, fell in her eyes. She blew it away, but a wisp of her blonde bang fell back. Irritation blew through her. She grunted and jerked her head back, and the errant wisp stayed out of her face this time.

Udonta raised the arm that wasn’t being worked on. “Lost yer hair thingy.” His voice was gruff, raspy, and close, the wind of his breath tickling the hair by her ear. She leaned close to him, focused intently on stitching up the oozing gash in the meat of his chest just below his collarbone. Focused intently on  _that_ and nothing else.

“Hang onto it for a sec,” she said, not looking up from her work, deftly switching both ends of the suture to her left hand so she could blot the wound with the gauze in her right. His blood, so deeply and vitally red it was purple, seemed to scream against the white gauze. Its coppery tang sat unpleasantly in her nose, but beneath that lay better, safer smells: the steel-oily scent of the ship, the ozone-electric residue that was always left behind after an FTL jump, the bite of alcohol from the medkit, and Udonta’s old leather coat.

He lowered his arm and gazed at something below and beside her, probably her hair tie in his hand. “Listen, uh. Thanks. Fer this. Y’didn’t have to.”

Riley had to fight her mouth, thinned to a line by concentration, from smiling. “Don’t worry about it. It was my damn fault you got shot in the first place. Least I could do.”

And it was. Damned if she knew why the  _anonymous party_  that had hired her to pick up Obfonteri had suddenly decided to do it themselves, before they’d given her half a shake at doing the job herself. Damned if she knew where the first shot had come from. One minute she’d anchored her little pod to the Eclector, prepared to feed Udonta a story about being hard up for cash and wanting to join his crew, and the next they’d been clinging to the walls for their lives as Obfonteri himself skedaddled them away from a surprise attack from a dozen and a half stealth ships black as death and shaped like the grim fucking reaper’s scythe…

…and right into a dozen more, one of which had found a way to drop into the Eclector a dozen black-masked four-armed assassins with dragonfly wings and deathwishes the size of a Kree’s ego.

Maybe those guys hadn’t been with whoever had commissioned Riley, but if they had, they’d not been briefed on what kind of ship she’d flown or what she’d looked like. That, or more likely, they hadn’t cared.

Why anybody would go to that much trouble for a skinny, broken-voiced Xandarian with an Adam’s apple that stuck further out than his cockatoo-beak nose was beyond her. They had paid her far too well to ask questions like that. But one thing she did know: none of them had wanted to kill Obfonteri as much as Udonta had wanted to keep him alive.

“Yer pretty handy wid that stuff,” Udonta said. His gravelly voice was quiet and low.

Riley ignored the unwelcome (but delicious) little shiver that voice sent up her spine. “Have to be. Ain’t no sawbones to stitch you up when you’re on your own.”

“Well if ya weren’t s’dead set on bein’ on yer own, I’d say join up.”

Shock jerked her head up, and she met his eyes, rich redbrown to luminous pink-red, for the first time. Had he known? She had barely gotten a chance to open her mouth before the black-masks had poured out of the atmo vents, so how had he known that was her cover story?

“Save me a few trips to Contraxia,” he rasped, cocking a lascivious grin.

A red flare of anger lit up Riley’s brain, as much for the deep blush creeping up her cheeks as for Udonta’s idiotic comment. She scowled at him and jerked the last suture on his wound brutally. He groaned in pain and tipped forward. The haughty grin became a rictus of pain, but impish light capered in his red eyes.

“That was uncalled for,” she snarled, curling her lip, and tied off the sutures roughly. Udonta grunted every time she snapped a knot snug, but his expression was clear:  _I deserved that, and it was worth it._

She tossed the bloody hemostat and needle into the tin tray on the grubby, dented table beside the bed and grabbed a large square of gauze and white medical tape. She pressed the gauze over his wound and taped each edge of it to his chest. Neither of them said anything else while she worked. Riley did not meet his eyes again.

“You oughtta change that every couple hours, but I doubt you will,” Riley said brusquely, angry at him and angrier at herself for not being as angry at him as she thought she should be. “You also ought not to fuckin’ insult the person who’s stitching you up next time, jackass.”

Without another word, she turned on her heel and left.

—

The Eclector was a big ship, and aptly named. She spent a good half an hour wandering the steel-and-pipe corridors in search of the galley until she ran into the greyhaired man Udonta had called Tullk. He blinked at her, as surprised to see her as she was to see him.

“Oh, uh…hey.” She said, raising a hand. “Can you point me in the direction of the galley?”

Tullk regarded her, his face unreadable, then hooked a thumb behind him. “Through there,” he drawled. “Two lefts n’ a right.”

“Thanks,” she said, and he held her eyes as he brushed past her.

She didn’t blame him at all for suspecting her for the attack; it probably was her fault at least tangentially. Tullk’s directions bore out. She stepped into the badly-lit, grubby galley. It was twice as big as she’d thought it was, and the larders were surprisingly well-stocked, if not dirty. She elbowed a drift of dirty dishes out of the way, set a dented tin cup down beside the aged, battered coffeemaker, and brewed herself a cup that tasted lightyears better than she’d expected.

“Well, if anything’s universal, it’s decent coffee,” she smiled to herself.

After the last black-winged assassin had dropped dead to the corrugated steel floor, Riley had decided beneath conscious thought that she was done taking jobs on Ravagers. They were outlaws; they were nasty and mean, most of them, but the code that bound them was as solid as iron and the love—though none of them would ever call it that–beneath was brilliant as diamond.

And nowhere had this been on better display than in the wicked murderous light of Yondu’s yaka arrow. Steered like a keen-eyed sheepdog by Udonta’s skillful whistle, it had led its own twirling, ethereal contrail through air, steel, cloth, flesh, and bone without hitch or falter. Its master’s resolve hadn’t wavered either, and the sight of him striding down the hallway as black-clad bodies fell around him, wreathed in thready red light, had never left Riley’s mind.

She let her feet carry her wherever they would, and she found herself at the bridge. It was empty; the ship’s nav blinked autopilot orange. The galactic clock read oh-two-forty. She liked this time of night, even though technically there was no night out here. There was no day, because there was no sun, no Terra to roll beneath her feet and turn the days and nights over and over. But she liked this bleak watch of night, liked it for its empty, benthic calm. The ship hummed sleepily to itself around her; the multicolored riot of stars capered across the sky in front of her. She slid into the captain’s seat; a breach of etiquette but there was no one here to witness it. She sipped her coffee and ran her fingers over the rainbow of plastic and glass figures Udonta had stuck to the arm of his chair and the control console in front of it.

“What a dweeb,” she murmured to herself, smiling over the rim of the cup.

She was done taking jobs on Ravagers, because if the day came when Yondu Udonta’s name was put in front of her, she wouldn’t be able to pick it up.

Bounty hunting was only a couple steps sideways from Ravaging anyway, so she’d run across the Centaurian a few times before. Usually they ended up on opposite sides of a phaser, and she allowed herself a smug smile to know that more often than not, he’d been on the business end. Nevertheless, he’d walked smooth and talked smoother, and for some godforsaken reason his broken-fencepost grin had charmed her instead of repelled her. Every time.

She hated it, didn’t understand it, her stupid teenager crush on a career criminal with a filthy ship and a filthy gleam in his red eyes.

No, that was a lie. She  _did_  understand it a little. Udonta’s cocky swagger-and-grin was half an act; the way he protected his own without thought or care for his life was enough proof for Riley that beneath all that leather and gruffness was a deep red vein of love that could be mined with enough time and patience.

Not that she  _wanted_  to be that patient with him; of course not. She had a life to live and a living to make, thank you  _very much_.

A soft, high warbling sound reached her ears a second before Udonta’s arrow flashed in front of her. It danced in the air above the control console, twirling and spinning, coiling its contrails in lovely serpentines. As quick as it had come, it darted behind her, and she turned.

Leaning in the doorway, stubby fin and eyes glowing red, was Udonta.

Heat filled Riley’s face. “I….”

“Sorry ‘bout the Contraxia thing afore,” he said without prelude. “I was jus’ pickin’. Y’know that, right?”

Riley nodded, her mind spinning.

Udonta strolled into the control room and plunked down in the co-pilot’s seat, none of his normal haughty smugness in his face or eyes. “Summa the crew think it was you what brought those black bugs down on us.” He looked at her meaningfully.

Riley opened her mouth, a catalogue of replies darting through her brain like flipping book pages. “They could have tracked my cruiser,” she said.

“Who were ya comin’ t’ get?”

Riley swallowed. Damn Udonta. He was smarter than he looked. “I gave the units back. I’m done taking jobs out on Ravagers.”

For a split second, Riley swore she saw a smile flick over Udonta’s long face. “Me?”

She sighed, irritated all over again, and sagged back against the pilot’s chair. “I’m not gonna do this with you, Udonta. I said I’m done.”

He nodded and sucked his teeth. “That’s good.”

The air in the control room suddenly felt too warm, too close, too laden. Riley lurched to her feet. “I’m gonna check the damage on my cruiser. Hopefully it won’t take long to get it fixed, if I can borrow–”

She walked as she talked, but she didn’t get far. Udonta’s hand clamped down on her forearm and whipjerked her around. Her own momentum spun her against him, and she slammed into him facefirst. He wasn’t wearing his coat, but the smell of leather smacked her nose. So too did the smell of  _him_ : strong but not unpleasant, heavy and redolently male. She backed up, but he’d snugged an arm around her waist to hold her to him. “Hey–!”

“I never thanked ya proper fer patchin’ me up,” he rumbled. His voice sent one cold arrow down her spine and one hot one. This last landed deep and low in her belly and lit a coal there. He stopped any more fuss on her part with a rough, sharp kiss, and she went rigid in his arms.  “Mmm!” She yelped, but it was muffled by Udonta’s mouth. He let go of her wrist and moved his hand up to her jaw, then to the back of her head.

She struggled against him for a moment. Then a switch flipped in her mind and suddenly she no longer wanted to get away. She looped her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him, moving her mouth into the kiss. His teeth were sharp and his mouth tasted like old beer, but she liked it anyway. He tasted like he smelled, and he smelled like  _him_ , and it wasn’t Chanel No. 5 but she didn’t want it to be. She wanted it to be just what it was. Just what  _he_  was.

She broke the kiss and sucked in a deep breath. “You’re  _welcome_ , Captain,” she purred, lit from the inside by the warmth in her belly and the tingle on her lips.

He smiled. “Ain’t no hurry on fixin’ yer ship. Y’can hang around a while.”

She hiked an eyebrow, acutely aware of the hardness that had recently developed at the front of Udonta’s pants. “Save you some trips to Contraxia, huh?”

Udonta’s smile broadened to both rows of teeth and his hands slipped lower on her waist. “You offerin’, baby?”

“You really shouldn’t be doing something that… _strenuous,_ ” Riley purred, running her fingers lightly down the front of his leathers, “with your  _wound_  and all.” She clicked her tongue regretfully. “I’d say yes, but you’re  _wounded_ , Captain, and you need your rest.” Her hands reached the belt at his waist, which she slowly began to undo.

Udonta made a noise deep in his chest which could have been a chuckle or it could have been a growl, and nudged her backward toward the door. Riley thought he would lead her down to his barracks, but instead he punched the door sensor with the heel of his hand. The wind of the door irising closed blew a whisp of black hair across her face. Udonta pressed her against the wall by the door and kissed her again, hard. His teeth cut into her lip but she didn’t care. She scrabbled at his belt more urgently now, which made him chuckle. He moved one hand from her waist to her belt and undid it with a deft and practiced hand. Leather creaked, cloth rustled, belts clinked, and Riley’s trousers were around her ankles. She kicked out of them and dug around for the rim of Udonta’s trousers. Found none. Was he in a jumpsuit? Or just in too many fucking layers?

“It’s like a Rubik’s cube down there, Udonta,” Riley hissed. “Don’t make it too complicated or I’ll lose interest.”

He rumbled a laugh which said  _I know better than that_  and reached into a vertical slit she hadn’t noticed before. She reached down to take hold of his dick—she’d never seen a Centaurian one before—but before she could, Udonta hooked his arms beneath the crease between her ass and thighs and hoisted her up. A brief pang of concern for the stitches she’d put in his shoulder passed through her mind, but it fled as Udonta plunged his face into her hair by her neck and began nibbling the delicate flesh there. He had her pinned completely against the wall of the control room, but even the weight of him constricting her lungs wasn’t enough to cool the rapidly growing fire in her. The tip of his dick briefly grazed her inner thigh and she moaned into his ear. One hand was clamped on the back of his head and the other gripped a strap on his back.

“Y’smell damn  _good_ fer a Terran, baby,” he murmured hoarsely.

“And you smell damn bad for a Centaurian.”

Udonta bit down on her neck, and she yelped. “Play nice, Udonta.”

“Ain’t my style.”

“I know,” Riley breathed.

His left hand slithered close to her pussy and slipped in. They both groaned.

“Been wantin’ t’do this since I first laid eyes on ya, baby,” Udonta rasped.

“Then what the hell’re you waiting for?”

Udonta rocked his hips forward and dropped Riley down on his dick. She gasped and wrapped her legs tighter around his waist.

The wall was an uncomfortable as hell surface to get fucked against—her hair caught in the chinks and joints in the steel and her head and chest were pinned in place—but Udonta set a maddening rhythm and Centaurian dick was apparently just different enough from Terran dick to make things…  _interesting._  It was thicker at its base than at the tip, so every time he thrust forward, he filled her in a way she’d never felt before.

“Mmm, you feel  _s’good_ , baby,” he murmured.

“I bet you say that to all the lovebots,” she panted.

Udonta laughed deep in his chest. “Donchu worry, sugar, you’re worth at least twenty o’ them.”

“Oh, I’m saving you a  _ton_  of trips then.”

He began to grunt with effort on each thrust, but Riley barely noticed the ragged edges of the sound and the shake in his muscles. The coal in her belly had burst into a flame and curled through her veins, lighting up every nerve ending. She bared her teeth in an unconscious snarl and tried to call his name but the orgasm ripped through her like wind-driven wildfire, immediate and savage. Her back snapped into an arch and she cawed hoarsely. Udonta had paused his rhythm while she came, and picked it back up once the orgasm ebbed and her body relaxed. He moved slower, less deeply, and Riley realized the grunts were not only of effort, but of pain.

“Udonta, you idiot, you’re gonna open your stitc–”

He did three things at once: yank himself out of her with a backward snap of his hips, rock himself forward again, pinning her even more tightly to the wall, and clap one hand over her mouth.

It was his turn to cry out; Riley felt the hot slippery length of his dick pulse against her belly as he came.

The sound from him cycled down from yell to growl to groan. His hand slid roughly from her mouth. He, out of strength, released her. She unlooped her legs from his waist and slid down to stand—unsteadily—between him and the wall.

They remained there for a moment, forehead to forehead, breathing each other’s spent air. Then Udonta did something Riley was not prepared for: he cupped her jaw in his right hand, leaned forward, and kissed her—softly, sweetly.

She blinked at him, too surprised to unpurse her lips. He turned away and bent to a compartment on the pilot’s chair, rummaged in it, pulled out a dirty rag. When he turned back, his leathers were clean and his dick was out of sight. He tossed her the rag. She caught it on reflex, her mind still whirling with the fuck she’d just had and what had come after the fuck.

“Next time I catch ya in my chair I’ll fuck ya in it,” he said, warning in his voice and invitation in his pink-red eyes.

Riley studied him carefully, but whatever impulse had led him to kiss her like a lover was no longer there. Or hidden. Without another word, he turned on his heel and left.

—

Riley took her time fixing her cruiser. Three days out of that week, she waited until the ship fell asleep and snuck back to the control room. Arranged herself in the pilot’s chair. Waited. Even fell asleep and woke up that morning with a bitch of a crick in her neck, but she saw neither blue hide nor stubbly grey hair of Udonta.

Standing at the coffeemaker, for all of two minutes, she hated him. Doubted herself. Wondered if that really  _was_ all he’d been after—just a fuck to save some money—and the gentle kiss she couldn’t seem to shake the taste of was—what, then? A pity thing?

She reminded herself of the admonishment she’d made to herself earlier: she had a life to live and a living to make, and damned if she was going to just shove all that aside to chip away at the leather around Udonta’s heart. It wasn’t her job. Wasn’t her place. Wasn’t  _her._

She stepped onto her cruiser, waved bye to Tullk, Obfonteri, Taserface, and the others who, their suspicions allayed, clustered around the exit to see her off. She spared no look or thought for Udonta, who wasn’t there anyway. She plopped herself down, revved the engine, swept her long hair out of her face, and launched.

—

Yondu stood in the empty control room, one hand on the back of the empty pilot’s chair, Riley’s hair tie looped through the fingers of his other hand, and watched her little pod scoot away.

He brought the black elastic loop to his lips and kissed it tenderly.


End file.
